What we are up to

Bad news for our Liverpool readers: there are no tickets left for Simon Reynolds' lecture about the hardcore continuum on Wednesday. In a brilliantly stupid move, host venue FACT have relocated the event from one of it's large cinema screens (as advertised) to a pokey 50-seater, ensuring as few of us as possible can hear the man speak his brains.

Anyway, all is not lost. Who needs a hardcore continuum when, as a quick search reveals, there's a wealth of others to enjoy:

1. The ContinuumWhile it might be one of several role-play organisations in the UK claiming exclusive rights to the name, The Continuum is damn sure the only one that can boast 226 advance tickets sold for it's convention at John Foster Hall, Leicester in May. Board member Jeff Richards (who exorcised the demon that plagued Glorantha, and once punched Kurt Cobain) is another of The Continuum's claims to fame, not to mention the fact that it's commitee chair, Laurence Whittaker, invented the icosakaipentagonal trapezohedron.

2. Stargate: ContinuumA straight-to-DVD classic from the people who brought you Stargate. Will Jack and T'ealc defeat Ba'al, last of the evil System Lords? Will Mitchell and Carter make it to Antarctica? And will Daniel ever get his leg back? Lead actor Richard Dean Anderson harks back to his days as MacGyver on the DVD commentary, claiming he made the entire film with only a Swiss army knife, roll of duct tape and some hardened Juicy Fruit he chipped off a radiator.

3. Compacted connected Hausdorff spaceNamed in honour of German mathematician Felix Hausdorff. If I had to choose just one continuum to take with me to a desert island, it would have to be this. Hah... either that or a non-empty compact connected metric space. But who's splitting hairs?

4. ContinuingOften used mistakenly (cf. "the space-time continuing"), but I include it here so you don't get confused. To see the word in it's proper context, take a look at the following sentence: "We are continuing to request tickets for the Simon Reynold lecture, but the outlook is shit."